


Horklumps & Hippogriffs

by teraspawn



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Magizoology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-31 05:53:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21441274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teraspawn/pseuds/teraspawn
Summary: I look back across the years to the seven-year-old wizard who spent hours in his bedroom dismembering Horklumps and I envy him the journeys to come: from darkest jungle to brightest desert, from mountain peak to marshy bog, that grubby Horklump-encrusted boy would track, as he grew up, the beasts described in the following pages- Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.A young Newt Scamander has found an interesting creature in his front garden, and he's eager to learn more about it.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Horklumps & Hippogriffs

In a damp patch of moss in the corner between two fir trees, a sandy-haired boy is clearing a space in the fallen bracken. He observes intently the pink, bristly toadstools he has uncovered, and pulls a glass jar out of his satchel. 

"There's something a little different about you, I suspect," he says to the mushrooms in a low, soothing voice, as though they could understand him. "Let's take a look at you."

He takes a handful of the soft, earthy-smelling moss that covers the ground, and uses a small stick to poke into down into the base of the jar. With careful gentleness in the seven-year-old's fingers, he pries the toadstool away from the earth with his stick. The pink flesh comes easily, but the muscular tendrils which extend from the stem are reluctant to leave their anchor in the earth.

He extends one finger and, experimentally, strokes a line down the nearest tentacle. With a shiver, the tentacle contracts, curling into itself like a fern bud to make a perfect Fibonacci spiral. The boy smiles to himself, as though he had just discovered a great secret.

After some more kindly wrangling, the toadstool is extricated and nestled into the moss bed of its new home. The lid of the jar has air holes bored into it and a fabric cover made from an old sock, left over from a previous investigation into the preferences and habits of fireflies. 

With his new treasure carefully stowed in his satchel, the boy slips back inside his home, leaving muddy footprints and loose bits of moss in his wake. A sign on his bedroom door proclaims it "Newt's Menagerie." The sign had been intended as a teasing gag gift from his older brother Theseus, but Newt had entirely missed the joke and beamed so earnestly on unwrapping it that his family hadn't the heart to set him straight.

The description is, after all, entirely accurate. On opening the door to the modest little room, one is immediately hit with a scent that wouldn't be out of place in a petting zoo - a mixture of sawdust, animal musk, and manure. The far wall is mostly taken up by a large, sprawling worm habitat, the denizens of which are mostly used to feed the other pets. A gnome is sitting expectantly on the windowsill, having climbed through the gap in the sash window, and is taking a great interest in the worms.

The boy opens up the lid of the worm box and scoops out a pink, wriggling handful. All but one of the worms is handed to the gnome, who begins to devour them with disgusting amounts of gusto.

The bed, which is squeezed against the window so as to take up as little of the valuable floor real-estate as possible, has a small rat asleep on the pillow, which wakes on hearing the door open and runs in excited circles, squeaking, until Newt comes close enough to allow the rodent to climb up his jumper and nestle on his shoulder. The bed linen is rather the worse for having been nibbled.

A squat, rough-skinned toad is perched on a large piece of bark inside a tank, croaking politely. Newt pulls a glass jar of fireflies from his bookshelf and taps out a few of them into the enclosure. The toad flicks out his tongue to draw the unlucky insect into his mouth and contentedly grumbles his thanks. The boy kneels next to the tank to make eye contact with the toad.

"Are those the favourites now? You certainly have expensive tastes, Herbert," he says fondly.

The rat is nosing around the boy's neck, licking in his ear and making him giggle. He sits, sprawled over the floor, and retrieves the toadstool from his bag. Unscrewing the lid, he holds a squirming earthworm within reach of the fleshy, pink mushroom, and squeals in delight when one muscular tendril wraps around the worm's wriggling body and draws it to creature's mouth. The process of eating seems to take quite a long time, the worm disappearing inch by writhing inch, a slow, inexorable slide.

Newt fumbles underneath his mattress to draw out the forbidden delight of his favourite book - not a copy of _Busty and Bewitched_, like under his brother's mattress, but a Muggle textbook on the habits and anatomy of animals. It falls open naturally to one well-thumbed page in the marine chapter, a detailed colour plate showing the anatomy and habits of the sea anemone.

"I'm terribly sorry about this, old chap," says Newt consolingly as he tips the toadstool out onto a sheet of newspaper, "but I'm fairly certain that you don't have a brain, so this probably won't hurt a bit."

Carefully, he selects the blade from his rusty Swiss Army knife, and, aiming precisely at the centre, cuts the toadstool in half in one confident movement.

The rat makes some unhappy snuffling noises in his ear and Newt shushes her gently. "For Merlin's sake, Ethel, I'm not going to do this to _you_. Look, it doesn't even have any organs!"

He pokes the dismembered organism with the tip of his blade. While externally very similar to a simple mushroom, the interior, as he had suspected, looked much like the inside of a sea anemone - not much more than a simple digestive cavity and tentacles to draw prey to the mouth, but still infinitely more interesting than an ordinary toadstool.

Reserving one half to carefully propagate on its bed of moss, he sets to dismembering the rest of the creature with single-minded focus. With a pair of tweezers, he plucks the stiff, black bristles from the crown and lays them out on a tissue. Next, he examines the nubbly lining of the digestive tract, referring back to his textbook for comparison. 

The gnome on the windowsill, spying his favourite food in Newt's hands, begins to chatter excitedly, pacing along the ledge to find a way down to the carpet.

Newt uses his knife to root around in the spongy innards, searching for defined structures and finding very little beyond the machinery required to catch and digest prey. 

"Tea's ready!" called Newt's mother from somewhere distant in the house. He's startled out of his concentration and looks over his shoulder at the source of the noise, but shakes his head and ignores the interruption, more interested in the vital business of his investigations than in the artificial social construct of meal times.

"Newton!" says the voice again, more sharply. "If you come down right now, you can meet the new Hippogriff chicks," she continues in a wheedling tone.

At this Newt forgets instantly his reluctance and gathers up his dismantled subject, handing it to the gnome, who chitters his thanks and gobbles the lumps of flesh with delight.

Wiping his hands carelessly on his grubby trousers, the boy kicks the rest of his equipment under the bed and sprints downstairs.

**Author's Note:**

> I was really inspired by Chris Packham's autobiography [Fingers in the Sparkle Jar](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27993268-fingers-in-the-sparkle-jar), which is well worth a read if you're interested in zoology, magical or otherwise.


End file.
